SALMA EL HARIRY

Salma El Hariry is a serial entrepreneur, a globetrotter between san francisco & cairo, who has a vision of 10x growth of emerging world economies in the next 10 year by igniting the full potential of human capital who are building tech startup that deliver exponential social and economic value. She calls them:
“Conscious Techies” and is herself on a life mission to connect them with rocketship tools to scale them to
[k]3= $B
Salma is currently the founder & CEO of S[k]aleUp​ ​Ventures,​ a new type of venture firm that uses ai and blockchain to be the startup’s online personal investment advisor as well as design data-driven offline interventions that can be a catalyst for accessing smarter investments in emerging markets!
Salma holds a bachelor’s degree from the American University in Cairo in Business Administration with a minor in Computer Science. She then went on to graduate from Hult International Business School in San Francisco with a Masters Degree in Digital Marketing. During her studies she consulted for over 50 startups as well as worked at Stanford University’s Peace Innovation Lab. The Lab’s mission of evangelizing technologies that deliver and capture value by building human connection engines made a major impact on her life goals.
Inspired by the growing frustrations of the exclusion of youth from leadership roles in MENA which lead to the Arab Spring, Sheryl Sandberg’s ‘Lean In’ book which advocates the rise of women leadership at the workforce as well as Jack Dorsey’s keynote speech at Techcrunch Disrupt 2012 where he profoundly explained the role of founders and entrepreneurs who have admirable curiosity, confidence and cleverness in taking on the mission of distributing the future which is already here. Salma subsequently was enkindled and decided to dedicate herself to empowering youth like herself with the tools, mindset, knowledge and global exposure and connections to harness the power of technology and innovation in owning and building the future of their dreams. She co-founded, designed and ran the very 1st accelerator in Silicon Valley, PITME Labs, which focused on the top 12 tech and social MENA based startups where they were exposed to 160 mentors (from Google, Facebook, Twitter, etc) in an intense 5 week mentorship program. As an innovation consultant at Innovety she worked closely with governments, NGOs, incubators, VCs and Investors driving new growth opportunities for innovation players in MENA.
She also helped kickoff & run a government initiative called ‘EgyptInnovate’ as the Managing Director.
EgyptInnovate is now considered Egypt’s online innovation hub that is connecting, inspiring and educating the next generation innovators with over 0.5million online global community and 1000+hrs of innovation educational content. She also co-created multiple international startup initiatives including PITME Catalyst, Hack for Peace in the Middle East and the TechWadi Annual Forum held in San Francisco, which aimed to build bridges between Silicon Valley & the Middle East Innovation scene.
When she’s not geeking out about the innovations of emerging markets especially MENA’s startup scene, Salma is passionate about building deep and meaningful relationships, Bollywood dancing, underground music and sunset/ sunrise scenic photography that she considers food for the soul.